The online classroom of UH 300-002, Andy Duncan's fall 2010 science fiction seminar in the Honors College of the University of Alabama.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Moon

So this contains spoilers in case anyone's waiting until the very last minute to watch the movie, but there was just something that I found very interesting about Moon that I thought would be interesting to discuss here.From the minute the movie started and we were introduced to the Kevin Spacey-voiced GERTY, I was SURE that GERTY was going to ultimately be the villain of the piece. It seems to me, that whenever there is a 'character' like GERTY in sci fi works, such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the chimp in The Island, they end up being quite villainous in some way. So I was quite surprised when GERTY actually helped the 'Sam's. I thought it was really interesting way to take the usual 'robots are bad' technique and flip it. In this case, the humans on Earth seemed much scarier than GERTY, who was only programmed to help Sam and all of his later clones however it could. I just thought it was very clever of Duncan Jones (original story writer and director).

9 comments:

I agree. I was torn most of the way through between thinking that GERTY was the sweetest and most caring robot ever and just knowing that GERTY was going to stab them all in the back. I was very pleasently suprised when Gerty remained loyal to the Sams.

Same here. I thought it was pretty funny that they gave him emoticon expressions. Much better than the unblinking red eye of doom, don't you think. One thing I liked was the how realistic the designs looked. I liked how GERTY had to move around.

I really kept expecting GERTY to have a knife attachment or something and just stab them all to death. I think its the Chuckie portion of our childhoods coming back to haunt us.

I thought that the cloning was by far the freakiest aspect in the movie. None of them knew the truth until the movie picks up. And doing the math, there had to have been at least 5 clones that were used before the movie started.

Why did they all keep getting sick and dying? Was there something that I just didn't clue in on?

I also thought GERTY was going to go all General Grievous and just start trying to kill Sam. Alas, unlike the Chimp, the Brains and the Weapon, it seems there are some good robots out there!

I think the cloning part freaked me out the most too. To answer Elizabeth's question, I think it's the concept that a copy of something is never going to be as good as the original. The clones were not perfect, and they couldn't hold up to the stress being put on their bodies so eventually they just break down. Something like that?

I think they built a self-destruct feature into the clones. They promised original Sam a three-year contract and that's probably how long any of them would be able to survive on the far side of the moon without going insane. By degenerating, killing, and replacing the Sams, you get a nice fresh supply of mentally healthy slaves.

I came into this movie with the exact same thought: the robot is the bad guy. But in hindsight, that was maybe just too obvious. I mean, this was a pretty well acclaimed movie, and I doubt it would have made it to that level if it had just been another tale of good bot goes bad.